A richly grounded tale of growth and belonging.
A debut YA novel sees a bereaved teenager return to her hometown and discover her magical heritage.
Sixteen-year-old Emma is half white, half Hispanic. When her mother is murdered, Emma moves from Chicago to New Mexico to live with her estranged father. Emma’s dad is the sheriff of Redención (Redemption), a tiny farming town holding out against corporate land-grabbing. Emma misses her mom, and her feelings toward her dad flit between anger and affection. But Redención feels like home. Many of the people there remember her from when she was a 2-year-old. Moreover, there’s Navaho spirit magic in the town: a star magic that has passed to Emma from her mom. Emma learns from Miss Ruth, a Navajo healer. The teen also has visions and is carried off by spirits. Most important of all, Emma discovers she has the ability to shape and control natural forces. With magic, she could save the town. But she is angry—driven by grief and the need to find her mom’s killer. And she is conflicted—drawn to the local football jock, a boy she’s been warned to stay away from. Can Emma come to terms with her new life or will she and Redención fall? Bedard has an easy prose style, infused with a sense of place. From the moment Emma arrives, Redención comes to life—be it through the rampant snuffling of the local pet pig, Esther; the hushed backdrop of a Roman Catholic upbringing; or the villagers’ occasional utterances in Spanish. These last may prove mildly disorienting for monolingual English speakers yet Emma herself knows more than a little Spanish; for her, the effect is one of being encompassed. The author’s depictions of people are vivid. Emma is a mercurial teen—at times embracing, at times rejecting the changes in her life—and the townsfolk who befriend her are deftly developed. Away from Emma and her circle, this characterization trails off. (The antagonists, for example, are little more than ciphers.) But that merely adds to the sense that Emma shapes her own experiences. The plot, too, moves at her behest, bolstering her as a character. All told, teen readers should approve.
A richly grounded tale of growth and belonging.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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